Top 5 of the best Parisian brunches

If Sunday brunches are an institution for you, here is a selection of the best spots to find them in Paris, from the classic to the cheese, eastern and organic ones.

Regular brunch at Les Fauves

At the foot of the Montparnasse tower, Les Fauves is a charming restaurant outlined by climbing plants that cover wood and stone walls. It welcomes you for an organic brunch, prepared from dutifully chosen French farmers' products. Take a sit at one of the large indoor tables, comfortably settled on yellow and blue leather benches, unless you'd rather choose the heated terrace. There's a distinctive feature on the menu: hashtags have been used to describe its contents: you'll add #marinated, #wasabi, #watercress, #pickles or #cucumber to your organic salmon. Otherwise, make your pick between truffle scrambled eggs or the small veggie salad, mini-pancakes, homemade chocolate brownies or lemon-thyme savoury cake, served with seasonal freshly squeezed fruit juice, of course.

Enter the Mama Shelter, designed by Philippe Starck, where the general atmosphere is subdued and makes you want to taste a delicious and satisfying brunch. The tantalising smell of homemade hot chocolate and coffee is an invitation to sit at either one of the long or round tables, in anticipation of your meal. To open up your appetite, plunge in the assortments of fresh rolls and butter pastries. It will then be time for an English breakfast, consisting in scrambled eggs, bacon and sausages.
Carry on your gourmand journey by picking several starters, like salmon tartar with fine herbs, or an assortment of cold cuts. Next step is hot-dish buffet, offering a variety of meals like duck shepherd's pie and pizzas. Take a break and play a game of table football before desserts and cheeses. You'll enjoy going back to the buffet for pancakes, fruit, morbier and goat cheeses. Mama Shelter's all-that-you-can-eat buffet should satiate even the hungriest.

Straight out of Australia, The Hardware Société opens its doors in the heights of the Butte Montmartre. Enter this small and bucolic filled with suspended plants, clear wood furniture and Christian Lacroix multicoloured butterfly-motif wallpaper. As a bonus, a magnificent view onto the roofs of Paris.
Here, whether you choose sweet or savoury, you are bound to find what you're looking for. The Australian-style French toast is not-to-be-missed, served with passion fruit cream, whipped cream, bits of kiwi, raspberries and meringue. The scrambled eggs are accompanied with homemade lox, back pudding crumble, blini and crème fraîche. As for eggs Benedict, they come with lobster meat and squid ink brioche.
Obviously, brunch essentials are available: assortments of French pastries, all kinds of jams, and to top it all, a selection of tea and coffee produced in Australia.

At Else, you travel to the East, where it is easy to forget about classic brunches made of croissants and pancakes. The minimalist brick walls and decoration and musical atmosphere are on par with an eastern style cuisine, as delicious as it is copious. This may well be your new Sunday headquarters! Among a yearly selection of eight countries around the Mediterranean basin, French-Israeli chef Daniel Renaudie chooses to highlight three of them each week. You will therefore try homemade revisited specialities using fresh produce and harmoniously marrying flavours and spices. The brunch could be Moroccan, Greek, Israeli, Turkish or Egyptian... In the Lebanese menu, try the grilled eggs with pita bread and the famous zaatar mixed spices, labneh (strained yogurt), tabbouleh, eggplant, falafel, moussa and jam. As for the Kurdish one, it offers chard pancakes, potato salad, sumac and yogurt soup and malabi pickles. Among the various specialities from Iraq, you can enjoy leak pancakes, turmeric tomatoes, crystallised lemon, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, apple crumble and dates. Everything comes with fresh fruit juice or mint lemonade, as well as a hot drink of your choice.

More than a restaurant where you can brunch on Sunday morning, L'Affineur Affiné is a genuine cheesemonger. With about 120 different sorts of cheeses produced from carefully selected farms, the dairy product is king of the brunch, even for dessert. The ideal spot for lovers of this smelly dish.
Start softly with a hot drink and freshly squeezed orange juice, and tuck into rolls, Bordier butter and pear jam. Get down to business with a cheese-ham croissant, gouda cheese and truffle scrambled eggs, as well as cheesy potatoes. Take a slight break with a green salad topped with Morello cherry jam and daily dairy deliveries. Finish on a sweet note with a delicious cheese-cake. For those who wish to carry on at home, you'll have the opportunity to buy cheese by weight, upon sound advice by Morgane and Matthieu, the owners of L'Affineur Affiné.